Search for answers enlightening

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Aug 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 1, 2013 at 9:20 AM

Nancy Maret, the wife of science writer George Johnson, was told she had stage 4 of a rare form of cancer when she was 43. Her experience with the disease and its treatment encouraged him to investigate what is known, and what isn't, about the feared and often misunderstood condition.

Margaret Quamme, For The Columbus Dispatch

Nancy Maret, the wife of science writer George Johnson, was told she had stage 4 of a rare form of cancer when she was 43.

Her experience with the disease and its treatment encouraged him to investigate what is known, and what isn’t, about the feared and often misunderstood condition.

The Cancer Chronicles is both a suspenseful account of the specific cancer affecting Maret and its effect on her life and their marriage, and a broad-ranging survey of the state of theoretical and practical research into cancer.

Some factors, Johnson learns, are clearly associated with the disease: smoking, obesity and old age.

Others are far less clear: Eating vegetables, for all its health-inducing effects, might expose the eater to the naturally occurring carcinogens that plants have evolved to ward off those looking to consume them.

Some of the most poignant passages of The Cancer Chronicles find Johnson and Maret searching for a cause for her cancer, which first appeared in a lymph node in her groin. Did it appear because she didn’t have the children she wanted and he didn’t? Was it because they were living at an elevation in Santa Fe, N.M., that was exposed to radiation and to the smoke from forest fires? Or was it the radon level in their house? Or the fact that they argued, thus raising her levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress?

Most cancer doesn’t arrive with any such easy explanation. Every case of cancer is different, and chance apparently plays a large role in its appearance.

The disease, Johnson says, “is the result of being multi-celled creatures in an imperfect world."

Cancer is far from a new disease. Fossilized dinosaur bones show signs of bone cancer, and most living creatures develop cancers of various sorts.

Tumors are not blobs of cells but “would-be creatures” in their own right, making complicated homes for themselves within bodies.

“Metastasis — what would seem to be a messy, haphazard matter of tumors shedding cells willy-nilly in a bloodstream — turns out to be exquisitely and horrifyingly precise.”

In fact, Johnson says, “in a very creepy way,” tumors are much like embryos, and “The early days of pregnancy resemble the incursion of a malignant growth.”

Johnson’s research, and his life, take him to medical conferences and support groups. He clearly describes how chemotherapy and radiation work — if clumsily and not always effectively — to fight cancer, and why they produce the side effects they do.

Like all good science writers, Johnson alternates between personal and impersonal views of his subject. For those suffering its ravages, cancer is horrifying; from a more objective perspective, the way it works is “a fascinating intellectual problem — a window into understanding life.” Readers will come away from the volume enlightened, if not comforted.